The Masters Of Improvisation

Anything A Weapon In Hands Of Inmates

Inmates know how to make a small flame thrower using powdered coffee creamer. They know metal shavings and ground up match heads can make a grenade powerful enough to blow a heavy-duty lock.

Convicts have used waxed-dental floss to cut though metal bars or braided it into a rope strong enough to scale a 20-foot wall. They also have used electrical wires and a metal bar to make a device called a "stinger" that can boil water.

"These people are incarcerated 24 hours a day, and they have nothing else to do but think up ingenious things to make or rackets to get into," said Jim Hough, a corrections officer at the Greenville Federal Corrections Institution in Downstate Illinois.

So it came as little surprise to prison officials that an inmate at the maximum-security Stateville Correctional Center is suspected of constructing a crude incendiary device with a battery, electrical wires and ground up match heads and mailing it to U.S. Judge Blanche Manning. The bomb arrived Oct. 31 and was disarmed.

It also came as little surprise to prison officials that the inmate suspected of making the bomb, 28-year-old convicted murderer Peter Saunders, could have bought the material for the device at Stateville's prison commissary.

After all, Illinois state prisons sold powdered coffee creamer and waxed dental floss to inmates until the mid-1980s, when officials realized convicts were using the items as weapons or in escape attempts. Just last year, an inmate in Virginia scaled an 18-foot wall and escaped from a county jail using a rope fashioned out of dental floss bought at the commissary there.

Nic Howell, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections, said the agency is investigating how the bomb package escaped detection in the prison mail service, even though it was examined by an X-ray machine at Stateville. The bomb was discovered by a similar X-ray machine at the Dirksen Federal Building.

"We are reviewing the entire security aspect of the mail service," said Howell. "If we need to make changes, we will do so."

Howell said Saunders, who is serving a life sentence for the 1983 slaying of a Dearborn Park woman, has been moved to a more secure area of the Stateville prison. He has not been charged in the attempted bombing.

Howell said the Corrections Department is not considering banning the sale of batteries, matches and electrical equipment that are stocked in the prison store and that Saunders may have used to construct his incendiary device.

Why sell these items to inmates?

With more inmates serving longer sentences in increasingly overcrowded and violent prisons, Howell and other corrections officials say their ability to control an inmate's access to the prison store is a primary management tool for keeping unruly convicts in line.

If an inmate breaks a rule, the prison staff can suspend his shopping privileges. It can also confiscate an unruly inmate's radio, television or Walkman--or limit his recreational time and visiting privileges.

"When I go into a tier, there is one of me and 150 of them," said Hough, who also worked four years as a corrections officer in Illinois prisons. "What fear do they have of me? None. I'm not armed. My only power over them is taking their privileges away."

State and federal law requires prisons to provide inmates with basic items such as clothing, soap and bedding, as well as access to telephones, mail service and the law library.

Prison officials also allow inmates to have some personal items such as extra pants, T-shirts and socks. But prisons are not required to provide inmates with access to a commissary, a kind of corner convenience store stocked with everything from candy bars and cigarettes to shampoo and gym shoes.

Inmates in Illinois state prisons are allowed to spend up to about $50 a month at the prison commissary. Inmates at the nation's 81 federal prisons can spend up to $140 a month on commissary goods. No cash is allowed in prison, so inmates charge their goods against a personal account.

"We determine what inmates have access to based on security," said Thom Metzger, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. "What is a right and what is a privilege is a very delicate balance."

But Metzger and other corrections officials say closing prison commissaries would not prevent inmates from fashioning weapons, or even a bomb. Inmates often make homemade knives, known as shanks, by filing down a toothbrush or by inserting a sharp metal piece into a Bic pen. They've also been known to cut through metal bars using guitar strings.

In July, Saunders pleaded guilty to having a shank at Stateville and was sentenced to an additional year in prison by a Will County judge.

"Spoons are filed down to make weapons," Metzger said. "Does that mean we shouldn't allow spoons in prison? I don't think we'd want to do that. Every possession can be used in the wrong way."